Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (31 page)

15

A Missing Girl

This is a watershed moment when, finally, the public starts to see and feel, above all, just how low and disgusting this particular newspaper’s methods were

– Hugh Grant, 6 July 2011

As Liz Murdoch and Matthew Freud’s guests dispersed on Sunday, 3 July, the
Guardian
was about to break a story that would dominate the headlines for weeks, send media, politics and police into panic, cost tens of millions of pounds, and wreck multiple reputations. It flashed up at 4.29 p.m. on Monday, 4 July on the
Guardian
website, jointly bylined Nick Davies and Amelia Hill:

The
News of the World
illegally targeted the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family in March 2002, interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance, an investigation by the
Guardian
has established.

Scotland Yard is investigating the episode, which is likely to put new pressure on the then editor of the paper, Rebekah Brooks, now Rupert Murdoch’s chief executive in the UK; and the then deputy editor, Andy Coulson, who resigned in January as the Prime Minister’s media adviser.

The most incendiary detail was in the sixth and seventh paragraphs: that not only had the tabloid hacked into the missing thirteen-year-old’s phone, it had deleted messages to make space for more – which could then be mined for stories:

In the last four weeks the Met officers have approached Surrey Police and taken formal statements from some of those involved in the original inquiry, who were concerned about how
News of the World
journalists intercepted – and deleted – the voicemail messages of Milly Dowler. The messages were deleted by journalists in the first few days after Milly’s disappearance in order to free up space for more messages. As a result friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive.

Five months later, the
Guardian
would admit that it was unlikely the
News of the World
had caused this ‘false hope’ moment, which was more probably the result of an automatic deletion by the phone company. (See Chapter 21.) In July 2011, the Metropolitan Police, Surrey Police, News International and the Dowler family all believed that the
News of the World
had been responsible.

Ten minutes after the story had appeared on the
Guardian
website, Tom Watson (who had been given advance notice of it by Davies) stood up in the Commons chamber and relayed the news. ‘In the last few minutes,’ he said, ‘it has just been revealed by the
Guardian
newspaper that Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked by private investigators working for the
News of the World
. As well as being a despicable act … it also strongly suggests that Parliament was misled in the press standards inquiry held by the select committee in 2010.’ MPs were stunned. David Heath, the Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader of the House, visibly shocked, followed Watson out of the chamber saying: ‘Did you really say Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked?’, then ran off back to his office.

Mark Lewis, now representing the Dowler family, was interviewed by Sky News standing outside the Royal Courts of Justice. ‘There are no words to describe how awful this is,’ he said. ‘The parents were getting through the most awful experience for any parent. It’s unimaginable, and yet people in the
News of the World
had no compunction, no fear of anything; no sense of moral right.’

By any standards, Milly’s parents, Bob and Sally Dowler, had been tormented enough. They had experienced nine awful years since their daughter had disappeared in the commuter town of Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, on her way home from school on 21 March 2002. In the weeks following her disappearance, despite a £100,000 reward offer from the
Sun
, detectives could not find her killer and even began to suspect her father, Bob. The Dowlers repeatedly fell victim to hoaxers who claimed to know what had happened to their daughter. Her body was found in woods twenty-five miles away in Yateley, Hampshire, in September 2002.

In 2008, police finally identified the prime suspect as Levi Bellfield, a nightclub bouncer jailed for murdering two young women. At his trial for Milly’s murder in May and June 2011, Bellfield refused to testify but the Dowlers were subjected to a distressing cross-examination by Bellfield’s barrister, Jeffrey Samuels, who explored Bob Dowler’s private life and read out Milly’s letters saying she was a disappointment to her family. During her cross-examination Sally Dowler collapsed in the witness box. On 23 June, Bellfield was convicted of murder, but prejudicial newspaper coverage led to the abandonment of his second trial for the attempted abduction of an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Rachel Cowes. On Sunday 3 July, as Liz Murdoch and Matthew Freud’s guests were waking up after their Cotswolds party, the
News of the World’
s leader column condemned the Dowlers’ ‘now-infamous courtroom torture’.

The reality was that within days of Milly Dowler’s disappearance, the
News of the World
had put its electronic detectives on her trail, asking Steve Whittamore to trawl phone numbers registered to the Dowlers in Walton-on-Thames. His accomplice John Boyall had blagged two ex-directory numbers out of British Telecom, one for the Dowlers’ home.

The Dowlers had clung to hope their daughter was alive partly because it looked as though she had been accessing the voicemail of her mobile phone. Soon after she went missing her inbox filled up with messages from anxious family members and friends and would accept no more, but on 24 March her voice could be heard again asking people to leave messages. (In November 2001 her mother explained her ecstatic reaction: ‘She’s picked up her voicemails, Bob. She’s alive! I told my friends: “She’s picked up her voicemails! She’s picked up her voicemails!”’)

Nine years later, detectives on the Met’s Operation Weeting found evidence that the
News of the World
had hacked her phone; the reinstatement of her disembodied voice had seemingly been part of a calculated attempt to land stories for the
News of the World
, at a time when it was being edited by Rebekah Brooks, now chief executive of the UK’s biggest newspaper group.
*

News International said the
Guardian’
s ‘allegations’ were of ‘great concern’ and announced that it was launching an internal inquiry.

Radio and TV stations and press agencies picked up the story. At 6 p.m., it was the second item on the BBC news. By 10 p.m., it was top of the bulletin, a position it would retain for a fortnight. After the chimes of Big Ben on Radio 4, the
World Tonight
’s reporter Matt Prodger began his report: ‘The allegations couldn’t be worse.’ On
Newsnight
, Tom Watson attacked the subservience of the three main political leaders towards the Murdochs: all of them had been informed of suspicions that victims of crime were also targets of phone hacking, he said. ‘Politicians are frightened of News International. Ed Miliband is as guilty as David Cameron and Nick Clegg’, he said. Jeremy Paxman checked with Watson whether he had just included his own leader in that list. He had.

In the
Independent’
s offices, Martin Hickman and Cahal Milmo confirmed Operation Weeting had visited the Dowlers and internally talked up the story’s significance. The next morning, Tuesday 5 July, the
Guardian
and the
Independent
splashed the story; the
Daily Telegraph
,
Financial Times
and
Times
ran smaller pieces on the front pages, but despite the story leading the TV bulletins, the mass market papers tucked it inside – the
Daily Mirror
on page 6, the
Daily Star
on page 7, the
Daily Express
and
Daily Mail
on page 8. The
Sun
carried a six-sentence account on page 2. Soon the blanket coverage on TV and radio made underplaying the story commercially and reputationally impossible.

Overnight in Wapping, News International executives devised a plan. On the morning of Tuesday 5 July, the story was still leading the bulletins, but with Wapping’s spin:
News of the World
executives intended to meet the police to discuss the allegations. The BBC’s business editor Robert Peston blogged that Brooks still enjoyed Rupert Murdoch’s full support and would not be standing down, including supportive quotes from colleagues such as ‘She is committed to finding out the truth of what happened here and leading the company through this difficult time.’ (The right-wing commentator Toby Young complained on his
Telegraph
blog: ‘It reads like a press release that’s been handwritten by News International’s chief executive.’) John Whittingdale, chairman of the Culture Committee, said the
News of the World’s
misconduct seemed to be ‘a very separate question’ from the BSkyB takeover.
¹

The story overshadowed a visit to Afghanistan by David Cameron. At a press conference, the Prime Minister spent fifty-five seconds condemning the hacking, while avoiding mentioning the
News of the World
, News International, Rebekah Brooks or Rupert Murdoch. Referring to ‘the allegations’, he said: ‘If they are true, this is a truly dreadful act and a truly dreadful situation. What I’ve read in the papers is quite, quite shocking, that someone could do this knowing the police were trying to find this person and trying to find out what had happened.’ The police should pursue the matter vigorously, he added.

At 10 a.m. the next day, as he drank black coffee at the Fire Station in Waterloo, Tom Watson was called by Ed Miliband’s office, concerned that his comments on
Newsnight
made it look as if he was trying to ‘bounce’ the party leader into acting. Since winning the Labour leadership in September 2010, Miliband had been accused of being too low-profile. In a late-night phone call with Miliband in March, after watching tribute band the Whoo, Watson had mentioned the prospect of a public outcry arising from the
News of the World’
s targeting of crime victims, shortly after which, on 19 April, Miliband had called for an inquiry: his office were perplexed at the charge of complacency.

At midday, Ed Miliband took the biggest gamble of his leadership to date: he called for Brooks to ‘examine her conscience’ and ‘consider her position’. He described the hacking as ‘truly immoral’, adding: ‘But this goes well beyond one individual. This is about the culture and practices that were going on at that newspaper over a sustained period. What I want from executives at News International is people to start taking responsibility for this …’ Party leaders usually bent over backwards to accommodate News International; now Miliband was damning the company and effectively calling for its chief executive’s resignation. Senior Murdoch journalists were furious. The parliamentary lobby was abuzz with rumours of a spat between the Labour Party spokesman Bob Roberts and Tom Newton Dunn, the
Sun’
s combative political editor. Roberts would not publicly discuss the row, but he reputedly told Newton Dunn not to take Miliband’s comments personally, to which Newton Dunn replied: ‘We do take it personally and we’re going to make it personal to you. We won’t forget.’ ‘They were very clear with us,’ Miliband told the
New Statesman
later, ‘that Rebekah Brooks and Rupert Murdoch would be the two people standing at News International when everyone else was gone.’
²

News International now found itself under attack from all sides. While previous polling showed that the public disapproved of phone hacking, the best-known victims so far had been wealthy celebrities; the targeting of a missing schoolgirl was regarded as truly heinous. Irate readers berated journalists picking up phones in the
News of the World
newsroom; many were swearing. Reporters felt dreadful. Dave Wooding, the
News of the World’
s associate editor, woke up that morning and ‘felt sick’. . .‘And for the first time in my career – I’ve been in tabloid newspapers since I left local newspapers – I felt quite ashamed not only to work for the
News of the World,
but to work for a tabloid paper and actually started to think about changing career. [Readers] were all ringing in and Twitter was going into meltdown calling us scumbags …’
³
Subscribers complained about the lack of prominence given to the story by that morning’s
Times
, which responded by making it its online lead. The
Sun
disabled the comment section of its website after it was deluged with complaints.

In an email to all News International staff, Brooks sought to steady nerves. The previous week she had warned that cost-cutting would lead to redundancies; now she had to confront the new ‘allegations’, which had left her ‘sickened’. She wrote: ‘Not just because I was editor of the
News of the World
at the time, but because if the allegations are true, the devastating effect on Milly Dowler’s family is unforgivable.’ She explained that NI’s executives had no knowledge of the work of Mulcaire, whom she described as ‘a freelance inquiry agent’. ‘I am aware of the speculation about my position,’ she added. ‘Therefore it is important for you to know that as chief executive, I am determined to lead the company to ensure we do the right thing and resolve these serious issues.’ At a lunch with advertisers in London,
The Times
’ editor James Harding said that, ‘if true’, the ‘allegations’ – which no one had denied – were disgusting, and that his paper would report the story accurately.
*
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